Lost and found in the Middle East…

Tag Archives: Yaqut al-Hamawi

I’m currently transliterating/translating an index to persons mentioned in Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s famous Muʿjam al-Buldān. It’s wonderful working with encyclopedic texts; I have had the opportunity to explore everything from Parthian (Arsacid) rulers and ancient Arab battles over horses to love poets and hadith transmitters. But today I came across a very curious entry in the index:

The oddity is that “al-Bukhārī” (d. 870 CE) is perhaps the most famous transmitter of sayings ascribed to Muhammad, while “Bukht Naṣar” is the Arabic spelling of Nebuchadnezzar (6th C BCE). What’s going on here? Continue reading →

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) was a popular preacher and Muslim legal scholar in Damascus under Mamluk rule. He is primarily remembered for writing polemics against almost everyone (Jews, Christians, Alawites, Twelver Shiites, wild Sufis, the Mongols who had recently converted to Islam, Persian speakers, Sunni Muslims who engage in popular practices such as shrine visitation and praying to saints), and the famous traveler Ibn Battuta described him as having “some kink in his brain” (Gibb trans.). He is a leading authority cited by Wahhabis and other Salafis today. So one does not expect him to be a main resource on the religion of his opponents. But in reading this week from one of his polemics (against those Muslims who participate in non-Muslim festivals), I came across his account of what happened on Palm Sunday, a version of the events which I had never heard: